Where now for the savants of sadistic suffering and connoisseurs of kiddie killing? What next for aficionados of asphyxiation and devotees of deviancy? These were the questions left dangling like a pervert's privates at the end of the final-ever episode of Waking the Dead. Who will meet the obvious demand out there for criminally sick and twisted plotlines?

All we can say for certain is that the bar on wackjob antics was raised to a fiendishly intimidating height by the send-off – after nine series, 11 years and about 500 butcherings – of Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve). It began with Boyd's sacking by the smug jobsworths at Scotland Yard who – the gormless desk-jockey bureaucrats! – never fully appreciated our man's improvisational approach to the rule book. Reeling from the shock, Boyd was then butted by a rent boy and you just knew that it was going to be one of those days.

Sure enough, by the conclusion of the second and final part, Boyd's colleague in the Cold Case Unit, Detective Superintendent Sarah Cavendish had been murdered by one of the Yard's top brass, Assistant Chief Commissioner Tony Nicholson (a superbly strange Paul McGann), who deviously framed Boyd, who in turn double-deviously arranged Nicholson's own murder. Then there was the murder of a pimp back in 1959, who turned out to be Nicholson's dad, and the subsequent murders of three policemen. Oh yeah and there was also the prolonged torture and murder of 66 teenage boys – 16 in England and 50 in Zimbabwe.

So quite a lot to cram in, allowing for the incessant flashbacks of the young boys being put through a psychopath's basement assault course of medieval torture. It's this sort of vision of crime drama – not so much broadminded as Broadmoor-minded – that Waking the Dead has made its own.

Which is why these must be anxious days for viewers with a taste for the less savoury aspects of human behaviour. For how often in Lewis, for example, do we see images of bound and screaming 14-year-olds being repeatedly submerged in a drowning chamber? And when was the last time in Midsomer Murders that a masked lunatic tormented a caged, terrified and pleading child?

Some may feel that such scenes were a tad gratuitous, but then they're probably not familiar with what happens when "a sexual sadist's psychopathy mutates from auto-eroticism". Fortunately, that's just the kind of prognostic development in which Dr Grace Foley (Sue Johnston) specialises.

"What I'd expect to find," she said, painting a picture of the suspect's likely hobbies, "is hardcore bondage and asphyxia-themed pornography on his computer and subscriptions to websites simulating homosexual rape."

In other words, a typical lifestyle portfolio for the villains on this show. Of course, for Brookside veterans, it's never been easy to hear Sheila Grant using that kind of language. But over the years, she has gamely tried to make herself sound as casually professional as a GP prescribing aspirin, even if she couldn't help looking like a maiden aunt who'd just found an S&M magazine inside her copy of the Lady.

Leaving aside the suspicion that she'd really much rather have a nice cup of tea, Grace has been a reliable soundboard for some of Boyd's more decoratively off-the-wall theories. "Grace!" he shouted out at one point last week. "Stop me if this is bullshit."

Who could stop Boyd, though? Once as a lean as shoestring, Eve has become an actor who knows how to fill out a suit. Standing there with his arms flexed at his side, a demented gleam in his eye, his grey bouffant slicked back like a Siberian wolf, Boyd was an unstoppable force and an immovable object. Had bullshit ever been a hindrance to his progress, the series would have ended years ago.

As it was, and perhaps inevitably, the conclusion was not entirely satisfactory. You could quibble about Boyd allowing a three-time cop killer to go free and pedants might focus on some of the more egregious implausibilities, of which there were plenty, although, by comparison with many episodes, this was a lesson in strict narrative cohesion.

Yet the big mystery that remained unsolved was not biographical but geographical: the whereabouts of Cold Case Unit's offices. It was referred to figuratively as "the bunker", to emphasise the team's isolation, but there was also literal merit in that description. Underground, definitely; possibly a car park or some kind of disused storage operation, but in any case nothing that shared even the loosest architectural relationship to the design vernacular of your local nick. What was that about?

As if to taunt the long-bemused viewer, the very final scene was under Waterloo bridge.

"It feels familiar, don't you think?" suggested Boyd to his dismantled team. "Too much concrete and not enough light."

And then they were gone, swallowed by the darkness or budgetary cutbacks, leaving a lot of weird people wondering where they were going to get their kicks from now on.

The Mind of the Married Man has been billed as a male Sex and the City, a prospect that may deter more viewers – especially men – than it attracts. In the event, it had little of the vim or pizzazz of SATC and none of the fashion. Instead, it focused on a bunch of dull-looking blokes talking about sex and women in the way that no man, apart from Richard Keys, has ever been known to do.

Indeed, it seems a little confusing that one moment Sky sacks the football presenter for coarse and sexist comments and the next promotes a male "comedy" that's full of lines such as: "I fucked the shit out of her." But what's really too much is that it's set on an American newspaper wherein columnists have their own offices and dedicated assistants. For crying out loud, I'm lucky if I get access to a computer screen and someone hands me my hate mail.

One of the few men who is funny about sex without sounding crass or creepy is Russell Brand. The guest on Piers Morgan's Life Stories, Brand was described by Morgan with his unique facility for hyperbole as "one of the world's hottest movie talents" and someone "who's done just about every single thing a human being could possibly do in their lives".

After that kind of introduction, the only way is down. But for once, Morgan's celebrity-celebrating patter didn't matter because Brand was just too entertaining to be thwarted by his interviewer's smarm bombs. "I don't even Google my own name," said Brand, when asked about how he deals with the rumour and gossip surrounding his life, "and that was my favourite hobby."